For years its been said that Blizzard has developed a Linux client for its very popular World of Warcraft MMORPG game but that it's never been publicly released. It turns out that this appears to still be the case that internally they have a Linux build of World of Warcraft but as of yet they have decided against releasing it to the public.

Mentioned this week by one of the Mac Tech Support MVPs in this Battle.net thread was this comment: "Last time I checked the developers have their own internal build of a linux client they use for testing."

This comment came after another World of Warcraft MVP had mentioned:

One of the big problems with Linux, and this is from other game developers too, is the problem of targeting a specific version of the platform. Since everyone is free to create their own distros, they can become somewhat unstandardized. That makes "targeting linux" difficult.

Add on that there are far fewer linux users than windows/mac users, and that you can play wow on linux using Wine... and there isn't a lot of reason to target even a specific distro.

Unfortunately for the Linux gamers out there, it doesn't look like the tide is turning yet inside Blizzard.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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